"Mona Lisa. . .She'd look better with a mustache don't you think?"-Batman, proving that everyone is indeed a critic, in The Brave and the Bold 77 (1968).

February 05, 2004

Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told TPB (1988)

I like a TPB with a theme. This book gives the reader a chance to see the different storytelling styles that were used for Joker tales from his first appearance in 1940 through 1980, encompassing 19 stories. Surprisingly, most of them are mediocre, which leads me to wonder how the Joker became the prominent Batman villain way back when. Anyone know the answer to that?

Before getting into the substance of the review, permit me to digress for a little personal color. This book found its way into my collection in 1991 when I was hospitalized for appendicitis and none other than Mag gave it to me to read while I had an unusually lengthy recuperation. You see, instead of timely treatment, I shuffled around with the intense pain for a couple of days thinking it was just a bad cramp or something until the damn thing burst. I am walking proof in the argument against Darwinism. Even worse, the day after the operation, a gorgeous nursing student wanted to give me a sponge bath if I could only have stood up and taken 4 steps to the bathtub. Alas, I was too weak to stand – proof that a weak body trumps a strong mind. By the time I could walk, the weekday shift was back – Nurse Ratched to be precise. If my comics trigger many more recollections like this, I’m giving up this indexing gig for a life sans material possessions.

Back to the Joker’s TPB. The first two Joker stories are reprinted here. They are excellent - the first few years of Batman stories have a captivatingly eerie sort of energy to them, which all too quickly faded into the more pedestrian and tame Batman that cavorted around into the seventies. The only other outstanding stories are from the 1970’s, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ “gosh they made it look easy” revival of the Joker as a homicidal threat that gives the reader the heebie-jeebies and the two-part Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers "Laughing Fish" classic from 1978.

The interesting thing is just how little the Joker stories varied from 1948 until 1966. The Joker of this time was a criminal who liked to clown around, but not in a frightening or insane manner. I’m not criticizing the Batman stories of the 1950’s and early 1960’s – they were not without their appeal with their 8 year-old boy’s worldview universe. But all of these stories could have substituted any other villain - or even a generic mobster - for the Joker without having any impact on the tale. By the 1970's Joker was getting a little edgier and had returned to homicide, but it wasn't a smooth return to being a genuine menace. For example, the Joker that was the star of his own title in the mid-1970's derailed the efforts to present a Joker that made the reader afraid to turn the page. On the other hand, Englehart and Rogers nailed the character better than anyone ever has in their story reprinted here.

As to the Joker in stories after the cut-off in this TBP, I've already discussed the problem with keeping the Joker around after he kills Robin and maims Batgirl here. In short - once the Joker commits these crimes on the people Batman holds dearest, Batman loses all credibility if he permits the Joker to roam unchecked again for even five minutes. They can no longer have a normal conflict. Every story must focus on the Jason Todd/Barbara Gordon issues, which would, of course, grow stale after a couple of rematches. Since Joker is a popular seller who makes frequent appearances in the Bat-books, the decision was made to ignore this giant pink elephant dancing around in the Batcave. An understandable decision from the point of view of wanting to sell Joker stories, but one which should have been foreseen when the decision to have the Joker execute the will of the phone-in callers was made.

Here's the play-by-play on the stories reprinted in this collection:

1) 1940 - Batman 1. Moody and energetic. A deserved all-time comic classic, albeit one that hasn't been reprinted often - in fact, I can't think of another time it was reprinted beside here and the Archives. This Joker is genuinely scary - both in act and picture (take a look at his mug on panel 5 of page 3 of the story). Other things I liked about this is that to reach a mass audience, Joker interrupted a radio show – talk about a forgotten era. Also, even though the Joker is killing innocents, Batman tells Robin that the time to strike against the Joker is not yet ripe – and lights a pipe and kicks back in his luxurious armchair. Was the 1940 Batman waiting for bigger press coverage before taking the Joker down? Talk about a man ahead of his time.

2) 1941 - Batman 4. The moodiness and energy of the early Batman stories is still in full force;

3) 1948 - Reprint of a Batman Sunday comic strip adventure. I have yet to come across a newspaper strip adaptation of a super-hero that I've found even tolerable, let alone enjoyable and this is no exception. This involves Joker starting a rivalry with the Sparrow for the title of Batman’s greatest foe, a theme that would be revisited later in this collection;

4) 1951 - Detective 168. The first attempt at an origin for the Joker, whose presence is secondary to the setting of this story at a college where Batman is training future detectives. Joker has lost all sense of menace and insanity by this tale – he is captured and tied up by a 22-year-old college gardener. This may have been a career low for the Clown Prince of Crime;

5) 1951 – Batman 63. The era of the gimmick-oriented stories is in effect. In this one, Joker comes up with crime costumes to counter Batman’s various crime-fighting costumes (surely you remember the “futuristic costume”, the “white costume” (you know, the story where Capt. Marvel zapped him right between the eyes and which ended with the Arkham Asylum Chorus doing a rendition of Revolution 9), the “golden costume”, etc….);

6) 1952 – Batman 73. The gimmick du jour is Joker’s utility belt. In contrast to the nightmare-inducing face of the early art, the drawings of Joker’s face by this time reassure us that his battle with Batman is just a game and nobody will really get hurt.

7) 1952 – World’s Finest 61. This one has the glorious Joker Mobile, with the Joker’s face in place of the front grill. Oh, how I would like to put that on the front of my mini-van. And I’m certain it would help make slow drivers in the fast lane decide to move out of the way without the need to resort to light flashing, horn honking or any of the more vulgar methods of persuasion. This Joker, by the way, may capture Robin (who was making a speech at a boat show?), but he doesn’t kill him. Heck, he doesn’t even unmask him.

8) 1953 – Batman 74. Joker schemes to try and be declared insane so he can be committed to an insane asylum where he can interrogate an inmate who knows where some loot is hidden. This story also featured my all-time favorite Silver Age plot device. Readers didn’t need Daredevil’s super senses to know if a character was lying. Anytime a character spoke and used the phrase “er - - “ before continuing, we knew they were lying. Good thing for Batman the criminals he kept saying “er - -“ in front of while he was undercover never caught on to this. I tried it just the other day, but “er – - honey, I only had half a beer last night, I don’t know why my head hurts too much to get out of bed this morning” didn’t fool my wife for a second. Maybe she’s been secretly reading Silver Age comics.

9) 1957 – World’s Finest 88. A Joker-Luthor team-up! What self-respecting comics fan could pass this up? And they both drive in an even hipper Jokermobile than the one in World’s Finest 61 – this one has a bubble top!

10) 1957 – Batman 110. The gimmicks continue to reign. This time, it is Joker’s “Crime of the Month Club”. For the June crime, two crooks crash a wedding by disguising themselves as the life-sized bride and groom on top of the wedding cake. Although the bald thug in bride drag gave me the creeps, I’ll confess to enjoying corny stuff like this in small doses, but I’d advise against trying to read all of the 1950’s stories in this volume in one sitting.

11) 1963 – Batman 159. After printing 7 stories over the 6-year 1951-1957 period, the collection skips 6 years to this tale in which Joker and Clayface (the Matt Hagen version) fight to be the top crook. Batwoman and Bat-girl are along for the ride. This may be the Joker’s TPB, but I’m going to talk about Matt Hagen, whose visually intensive powers – changing forms to become a fiery meteor, a fan with spiked blades or a wooly mammoth are out of place even in an era where aliens as adversaries dominated the bat-pages. Clayface in a more realistic detective-oriented Batman story would be a fascinating adversary – a master detective tracking a man who can assume any form. But in this harmless fantasy-land era of Batman seems to be nothing more than a Superman villain who made a wrong turn trying to get to Action. This tale also features the 8-year-old worldview on how women try to trap men as Bat-Girl and Batwoman ask Robin and Batman to hold them because they are “still shaky after fighting Clayface and you’re so strong!” I’d report that Batman and Robin resist these temptresses, but the story abruptly cuts away to the Joker’s lair at this point and I’m not sure if the dynamic duo succumbed to the charms of the bat-cuties or not.

12) 1964 – Batman 163. Another gimmick of the month story – this time it is the Joker Jury, which is derailed when Robin fakes a case of the smallpox. Try getting away with that for your plot in 2004!

13) 1966 – This was a cool inclusion. This is an E. Nelson Bridwell/Carmine Infantino story from a Kellogg’s Special and with it we bid adieu to the era of gimmicks. This is also the only story in this collection from the “new look” era of Batman, an era which I think produced some of the dullest Batman stories, so the underinclusion of that era is welcome.

14) 1973 – Batman 251. Skipping 7 years forward, this story was Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ successful effort to return the frightening aspect to the Joker. The story opens with a splash panel scary-looking Joker face taking up most of the space as he drives in the rain with his “Ha ha ha”s threatening to spill out of the splash panel. The next page introduces a grinning corpse and a Batman who tells the reader that he was expecting this since the Joker escaped from the hospital for the criminally insane. All it takes is those two pages to re-establish a Joker who is unique and genuinely menacing. Two pages! That’s impressive. There’s no chance you could substitute any other bad guy for the Joker and still have the story work anymore. This story also establishes that Joker can’t be satisfied killing the Batman – only outwitting him brings the Joker any pleasure and a dead Batman can’t be outwitted.

15) 1974 – Brave & Bold 111. In which Joker seeks the “ultimate triumph” – to kill Batman. Oops. What happened? Simple – this one took place on Bob Haney’s Earth brave & Bold, an unacknowledged mini-universe of its own. I remember buying this story when I was a pre-teen even though I felt cheated that Batman wasn’t really teaming up with another hero. Bob Haney’s work on Brave & Bold was something – every character was schizophrenic. Here, Batman is so outraged by a murder committed by the Joker to open the story that he swears “By God” that he will “destroy” the Joker. Commissioner Gordon urges Batman to uphold the law and not act like a vigilante, but Batman tells Gordon if Gordon wants the Joker alive that the police better find the Joker before he does. Then Batman teams up with the Joker. Then he laughs when he captures the Joker at the end, having completely forgotten his vow of destruction. On my checklist of things to do is to track down some interviews of Bob Haney – if any exist – to see what he reveals about the thought process behind his Brave & Bold work. More on that in a bit when the indexing catches up to Brave & Bold. The Jim Aparo art here, not surprisingly, is outstanding.

16) 1975 – Joker 3. A Joker series is an idea whose time has now come. Unfortunately, DC isn’t doing the book now. Also unfortunately, in 1975, it was an idea whose time had not come. This series was a giant step backwards from the menacing Joker Denny O’Neil revived in 1973. The odd thing here is that O’Neil also wrote this one! Joker fights the Creeper, but Joker isn’t killing anyone. The Joker in this story is more similar to the 1951-1967 version than the 1973 one. No surprise this series was short-lived.

17-18) 1978 – Detective 475-476. For all the griping I’ve done about Batman in my indexing, Batman is a character that when done well is so damned good that waiting for those moments pays off. The Englehart/Rogers run was one such moment. In fact, I’ll take their run on Detective over any other Batman story or run. Silver St. Cloud is, without contest, the best Batman love interest in the series and the only one with a fleshed out and interesting character that isn’t to some degree criminal. This story occurs towards the end of the Englehart/Rogers run – Silver has realized Batman was Bruce Wayne and doesn’t know how to handle the revelation. In the meantime, Joker has infected the waters off Gotham so that all fish bear the Joker face – those are some scary fish heads Rogers shows us. Read the sequence on pages 8-11 of Detective 475 where the Joker tells the Copyright Commissioner what Joker expects of him. The dialog is that of a chillingly insane madman and Rogers returns the horror to the Joker’s visage. In an unmentioned homage to Batman 1, Joker announces his murders via television before committing them without even needing to be present at the victim’s home. This is the Joker done to perfection. Joker announces a murder he intends to commit and he and Batman spar strategically to thwart each other – and Joker wins his fair share.

19) 1980 – Batman 321. Sigh. Another step backwards. This is by Len Wein and Walt Simonson & Dick Giordano. At least it looks good. And Len Wein is capable of much better stuff than this. Joker kidnaps a bunch of people who have thwarted him, including Robin and Alfred and ties them to an exploding cake until Batman rescues them with the Joker-Batman interaction consisting of physical fighting rather than mental maneuvering.

Finally, the book ends with a 6-page overview of Joker stories not included in the volume, an overview written by Mark Waid. Waid informs us how disappointed he is that Joker’s guest appearance in The Adventures of Jerry Lewis couldn’t be reprinted for legal reasons (presumably because DC no longer has the rights to publish stories starring Jerry Lewis). I’m with Waid on that. That’s a story that sounds like fun.

2000 AD Extreme Edition 2 (2003) (Part 2)

After I wrote up last night's entry, I read most of the rest of the book. I finished it up tonight. It was an amusing diversion from standard superheroics. P.J. & the Mock-Choc Factory, by Garth Ennis, was probably my favorite. Dark, dark humor in this one, folks--you have been warned. It's not the satire of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory you'd expect.

The stories picked up in quality after the ones I reviewed last night--I didn't really want to stop reading, but common sense actually kicked in a little after midnight. The tales did become a bit repetitious, which if I remember my ancient history, was a bit of a problem way back when I read Judge Dredd regularly. Part of the problem here is the focus on a single character--if I'd read them serially, with a few different stories in between the episodes with P.J., I probably wouldn't have noticed.

Although I'm not looking to read a steady stream of Judge Dredd stories, I will keep an eye out for future collections like this one. And maybe a trade or two.